The management team at a major car manufacturer had a problem.

They found that every week, an entire Tuesday afternoon, from 12:30pm – 4:30pm was tied up in the weekly management meeting.

The problem wasn’t that the meetings lacked value – they did give everyone an insight into how the manufacturer was operating – obstacles were overcome and project milestones celebrated.

The problem however was the time taken. There were 12 managers, and on average it took 25 mins each to deliver their update. Some managers were delivering their updates in 10 minutes, and some were taking 45 minutes.

Long, drawn-out presentations with 30 slides from some people. Short, tighter and more considered presentations from others.

You can sense the frustration in the room: the weekly management update meeting was becoming a burden on time, and demotivating for some.

Luckily, we were able to help them with the one thing that they needed to get rid of the pain.

Some structure.

We gave each of the managers a simple presentation template to keep them on track, and gave them all some personal coaching about using it.

The template did its job, acting as a roadmap to ensure each manager kept to the main points.

Each manager was able to distil down to just the key issues, and presentations suddenly got a lot more interesting.

Furthermore, we imposed a time guideline.

We suggested that each presentation should go no longer than 5 mins, with another 5 mins for discussion at the end – if needed.

If anyone had further points that didn’t concern anyone but them, then they held off until a more convenient time.

There was some resistance at first – especially from the more verbose members of the group!

But soon enough they realised the benefits of getting through it and getting back to a productive day’s work.

Now the group takes less than 90 minutes.

One week they told me that it was over in under an hour.

Best of all, they felt that there more information was covered, with less emotion, conflict and detail, because people were putting some thought into preparing using the template.

Do you have similar issues in your organisation? If so give us a call and we can help.